Shortly after posting about our 250th birthday, I came across a not dissimilar look at our 100th. An essay titled “An Uncertain Triumphalism” conjured up the old saying that “history repeats itself.” The piece, a critique of Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future, appeared in The New York Review of Books.
Fergus M. Bordewich, an award-winning author of works on the Underground Railroad, the Compromise of 1850, and Grant and the KKK during Reconstruction, penned this newest of many explorations of the Centennial Exposition. Held in Philadelphia, it is generally considered the nation’s first world’s fair.
Brenda Wineapple, a historian and literary critic, wrote the review essay. She is the author of several biographical studies of early American writers plus books about the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson and the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial.
As I read the essay, which went into considerable detail about the book, I could not avoid comparing aspects of the centennial celebration with the recent semiquincentennial celebration.
The organizers of the Philadelphia exposition and the inept chief organizer of the recent doings in Washington each wanted to project a notion of national unity while celebrating the country’s achievements and boasting about its economic strength.
You know the story of the modern event: fouled Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, east wing and south lawn of the White House wrecked for vanity projects, uninspiring mall fair that several states and major performers boycotted, and one rambling, uninspiring, self-serving, and often incoherent campaign-like July Fourth speech that appealed only to the speaker’s dwindling faithful.
Based on the review, Bordewich’s take on the 1876 fair is likewise not particularly favorable. Although he does note its impressive scope. Its more than 120 buildings—the largest of which was 6 football fields long and more than 450 feet wide—spread across 300 acres and housed exhibits from more than 30 countries. Ten million people poured through its gates.
As the exposition was coming together, the US was just emerging from the economic panic of 1873 and still trying to recover from the devastating effects of the Civil War. While organizers succeeded nevertheless in generating “buzz” about the fair, national scandals also created buzz.
The famous preacher Henry Ward Beecher had just been tried for adultery, with the proceedings ending in a hung jury. Ely Parker, the Native American commissioner of Indian affairs, was accused of making large government purchases without taking bids. Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano was suspected of buying inferior goods to meet treaty obligations to several Indigenous groups. And Secretary of War Henry W. Belknap had been forced to resign for influence peddling. These pale, I know, compared to all the political corruption swirling around us today.
All of that, and it was an election year.
Wineapple sees Bordewich’ book as an effort not only to highlight the exposition, but also “to puncture” the Exhibition’s “self-satisfied and benighted nationalism.” To do that he focused his attention on four individuals in particular: telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, railroad and newspaper mogul Tom Scott, the colorless soon-to-be president Rutherford B. Hayes, and Black entrepreneurial sculptor Edmonia Lewis.
Bell showed up at the fair and read some Shakespeare over a patented but primitive device that transmitted his voice to another room. Scott, who owned 6,500 miles of track, was the chief lobbyist for holding the fair in Philadelphia. He envisioned his coaches and luxury cars bringing millions of visitors to the site and untold dollars to him. One can almost see the guy counting his money like Scrooge McDuck or our current occupant of the White House.
With regard to Lewis, the review essay is unclear. Wineapple quotes Bordewich describing her as sharing with Bell and Scott “the spirit of a rapidly changing America that celebrated self-invention, unshackled entrepreneurship, and creative individualism.” Lewis’s 3,000-pound sculpture titled “The Death of Cleopatra” was one of 500 works selected for the fair. The only Black artist featured in the fair, she lived most of her adult life in Europe because of racism back home.
Hayes was something of a Civil War hero. Multiterm governor of Ohio, he had a reputation for honesty, and was the Republican nominee for president in 1876. He made only two appearances at the fair, neither of them remarkable. According to Wineapple, Bordewich views him as symbolizing the fair organizers’ desire to pump up American greatness while ignoring issues of class, race, and gender.
Hayes subsequently won the presidency in the famous Compromise of 1876 even though he lost the popular vote. Republican election boards in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina challenged the results, and rival sets of electoral votes arrived in Congress. Plus, to quote Wineapple summarizing Bordewich, both “Republicans and Democrats were trying to buy electoral votes. In addition there was intimidation of Black voters, widespread fraud, alleged terrorism, and the seizure of state courts.” Sound familiar?
Almost immediately after I read the review, a friend called my attention to America U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, a new book by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., a professor of history at Princeton. Like Bordewich, Glaude characterizes the Centennial Exposition as focusing on unity and patriotism, but he is much more critical of it.
In Glaude’s view, with Reconstruction drawing to a close and white rule reemerging in the South, the 1876 planners purposely projected a sanitized image of the nation that hid not only its history of slavery but also its lingering racial strife and the lives of Black people in general. This was, Glaude writes, “one of the most remarkable moments of disremembering” in US history.
In considering similarities between our recent birthday and the centennial, especially the aims of the organizers and the commonalities between the social issues and attacks on history then and now, it is sobering to think ahead to the mid-term elections of 2026 and beyond. So much is riding on them.
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